Did Donald Trump mention how much he hates Jerome Powell and how badly he wants to fire him?

Because if not, he meant to. Meant to mention it, I mean.

“‘Too late’ Powell. He’s always too late with interest rates, except before the election,” Trump mused, while regaling reporters gathered at Mar-a-Lago, where he met with Benjamin Netanyahu this week.

“That was supposed to help her get elected,” he went on, reviving accusations that Powell attempted to influence last year’s election by cutting rates at the September 2024 FOMC meeting. “But it had no impact. We won all seven swing states.”

To say that shtick’s getting old doesn’t even begin to cover it. And Trump has no conception whatever of the extent to which he’s playing right into the half-baked autocrat stereotype by scapegoating the central bank for anything and everything, including things that didn’t happen, or haven’t happened yet.

You wouldn’t know it from Trump’s rhetoric, but Powell’s delivered three straight rate cuts, at least two of which could’ve (and very well might’ve were it not for Powell) gone the other way.

There were two hawkish dissents among voters at the December policy gathering, and according to the account of that meeting, released by the Fed on Tuesday, “a few” of the majority who supported the cut “indicated that the decision was finely balanced” or that they could’ve just as easily supported keeping rates unchanged.

Although most policymakers seem to agree that the worst-case vis-à-vis tariff pass-through inflation was avoided and, relatedly, that the levies aren’t likely to lead to a sustained upturn in inflation, “several” officials warned on “the risk of higher inflation becoming entrenched and suggested that lowering the policy rate further in the context of elevated inflation readings could be misinterpreted as implying diminished policymaker commitment to the 2% inflation objective.”

I’d gently note that Scott Bessent isn’t doing the Fed any favors on that score by suggesting the Fed adopt a range for inflation rather than a point-specific target, with the upper-end of that range as high as 3%.

Although Bessent was careful to say such a shift wouldn’t be appropriate until the Fed restores inflation to target, the message was clear enough: Under Trump’s next hand-picked Chair, the Fed won’t balk at rate cuts just because inflation’s running a full point above target.

Of course, the Powell Fed isn’t balking on that front either. Indeed, Powell’s delivered 175bps of rate cuts with inflation running a full point above target, so let’s not pretend that’s Trump’s problem with the man he chose to replace Janet Yellen in 2018.

Rather, Trump wants to dictate monetary policy, not merely influence it. He doesn’t like the idea that something as important as the price of money is set independently (or quasi-independently) by a panel of technocrats he can’t fire at will.

Anyway, the December FOMC minutes didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. Nor was Trump breaking any news on Monday when he reiterated that he’d “love” to fire Powell. “Maybe I still might,” he added.

During the same exchange, Trump again threatened to sue Powell for gross incompetence related to renovations at the Eccles building which served as a flashpoint for tension between the central bank and The White House over the summer.

“We’re thinking of bringing a suit. Bibi, he’s up to $4.1 billion to do a renovation of a few small buildings,” Trump said, trying to rope Netanyahu into his crusade against Powell. “It’s the highest price of construction per square foot in the history of the world.”